Get local with the Local Business Center newsletter
Have you ever wanted more information about the traffic that your clients' Local Business Listings receive? How many people are seeing their listings? What are people searching for to find them? Wonder no more: You can learn how to use the new Dashboard within the Local Business Center to answer those questions in the inaugural issue of the Local Business Center newsletter.
In the newsletter, you'll also find tips and tricks for optimizing your clients' listings, adding driving directions to a website, and more. To subscribe, log in to your Local Business Center account and check the box next to "Newsletters" on the Settings tab.
In the newsletter, you'll also find tips and tricks for optimizing your clients' listings, adding driving directions to a website, and more. To subscribe, log in to your Local Business Center account and check the box next to "Newsletters" on the Settings tab.
Google Translate now speaks 51 languages
We spend a lot of time thinking about how information travels around the globe. After all, there are Googlers living and working in dozens of countries — and we're pretty sure our products are used in many more. So we're familiar with the need to translate information across borders, and we've been working hard to build the technology to enable you to do just that. Today, we're excited to announce that we've added nine new languages to Google Translate: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish. That means that Google Translate now supports 51 languages and 2550 language pairs — including all 23 official EU languages.
The translation quality of these newest languages is still a little rough, but it will improve over time — and we're continuously working to improve quality for all languages supported by Google Translate. We're also working to integrate Google Translate into some of our other products; you can already translate emails within Gmail, webpages using Google Toolbar, RSS feeds in Google Reader and most recently, documents within Google Docs. For more information about Google Translate and these latest additions, check out our post on the Research Blog.
The translation quality of these newest languages is still a little rough, but it will improve over time — and we're continuously working to improve quality for all languages supported by Google Translate. We're also working to integrate Google Translate into some of our other products; you can already translate emails within Gmail, webpages using Google Toolbar, RSS feeds in Google Reader and most recently, documents within Google Docs. For more information about Google Translate and these latest additions, check out our post on the Research Blog.
Monday French Chic Inspiration
Erinn came up with another inspiration board to start your week off right. The chicness of this French board is pulled together with soft blush colored details and black and white photographs. She thought a French winter wedding would look a little something like this:
Heather Gray, Blush and Ivory
{Eiffel Tower}{Bride}{Groom}{Necklace}{Bridesmaids}{Shoes}{Cake}
What do you think? We think it's lovely.
Eiza Gonzalez (Galeria 2)
Fotos:Eizaonline, EsMas.com y Revista Lola
Otras fotos:
Eiza Gonzalez (Galeria 1)
Eiza Gonzalez (Galeria 1)
Website:
http://www.eizaonline.com/
More High Quality Templates and New Premium Fonts in Display Ad Builder
Last week we announced new high-end "Elegant" ad templates that can help you build great looking ads in minutes. Today we're releasing additional "Elegant" templates in the "General" category, as well as templates in a brand new "People" category. This new category enables advertisers to use templates that have professional images featuring people
With some of the new templates, you don't even need to upload any logos or images. With just a little bit of text you can create an appealing display ad in seconds.
In addition to these new templates, we also added 13 premium fonts that you can use to make ads with maximum visual appeal. They include: News Gothic, Gill Sans, Futura and Nimbus Sans. Here are some examples of the new ad templates and fonts:
With some of the new templates, you don't even need to upload any logos or images. With just a little bit of text you can create an appealing display ad in seconds.
To start creating your ads, visit the "Ads" tab in any campaign, click "New Ad," and select "Display Ad Builder' from the drop down." If you want to learn more about creating and running display ads, visit the Display Ads 101 tutorial.
GatorBrite Professional Cosmetic Teeth Whitening
GatorBrite Professional Cosmetic Teeth Whitening is offering an amazing deal for MasterPiece Weddings clients! They are currently offering professional teeth whitening for brides and grooms for only $75.00 a person. (Retail is $129.00!) Now, if you haven't thought about it, having your teeth whitened before your wedding is probably a necessary investment. You want those teeth to sparkle against that bright white dress and shine in those timeless photographs. Plus, it's just another reason why you should go with MasterPiece Weddings! If you think that's a good deal, it gets even better! Why not have your entire bridal party go? When you bring in 4 or more people, the bride and groom can have their teeth whitened for free!
What are you waiting for?! Here are the details:
GatorBrite Professional Cosmetic Teeth Whitening
You could look like these brides with their beautiful, dazzling smiles!
What are you waiting for?! Here are the details: GatorBrite Professional Cosmetic Teeth Whitening
101 N. Main Street Gainesville, FL 32601
352-505-6886
New Interface Thursdays: Tips for keyword management
Now that most advertisers are using the new interface exclusively, we want to share some efficiency tips to really unlock the potential of the new interface.
Focusing on what's important
In the Keywords tab you have several tools that help you focus on what matters to you.
First, you can customize columns to show only the metrics you care about and in the order you want. You can then use filters to focus on keywords that match a certain criteria. For example, you might only want to look at keywords that aren't converting well. Filters let you hone on what's important. You can find examples of good filters to try in this Help Center article.
And once you know what you're looking for, you can put AdWords on the look out. Using custom alerts you can tell AdWords what changes are important to you and be alerted when they happen both in your account and via email. For example, using filters you identify your best converting high volume keywords. You could create an alert to be notified if the conversion rate on those keywords drops compared to last week.
If you're working through a My Client Center account, note that you'll need to log in directly to an individual AdWords account to set custom alerts for now.
Changing many things at once
Once you've found what's important, the new interface makes it easier to make bulk changes to your keywords. First off you can select many keywords at once and click Edit to open up all fields for editing. To save time, you can do this all with your keyboard: select keywords with X, move up and down rows using J and K, and press E to get into edit mode. If you want to select a consecutive list of keywords, select the first keyword then hold the Shift key, and then click the last keyword you want selected.
While in edit mode, you can pause keywords, adjust your Max CPC, change the destination URL, and switch the match type. You can also copy bids and destination URLs to all rows. We've also recently added the ability to raise all applicable keyword bids to their first page CPC. From edit mode, just click Prefill all CPCs to first page bid.
You can also use spreadsheet editing to make bulk changes. Spreadsheet editing lets you work with your keywords as if you were using a spreadsheet. You can use formulas, copy and paste, and even find and replace. You'll find spreadsheet editing by clicking More actions then Spreadsheet edit. Remember that spreadsheet editing can only be done within an ad group.
Moving things around
Maintaining a good account structure is one of the keys to successful AdWords campaigns. So, from time to time, you may want to move things around a bit to create more refined, relevant sets of keywords and ads. This is where the copy feature comes in handy. Like spreadsheet editing, you'll also find copy under More actions.You can copy keywords to another ad group or campaign. When copying keywords, you have the option to also copy the bid and destination URL.
We hope these tips help you manage your keywords more effectively and improve your AdWords campaigns.
For those (agencies) about to rock, we salute you
With Advertising Week less than a month away, we're excited to announce that voting for the YouTube Battle of the Ad Bands is now open. This competition puts the industry's finest -- musically speaking -- in the spotlight for a chance to be known as advertising's rock 'n' roll kingpins.
Last September, McCann Erickson brought down the house and took home the coveted trophy. Who will emerge as this year's champion? Wunderman with their rendition of AC/DC's "Live Wire"? Lowe NY's version of The Kinks's "You Really Got Me"? It's up to you!
RCKBAND, from Digitas, with their own take on a-ha's "Take on Me"
An independent committee from the Association of Music Producers (AMP) has narrowed the field down to 8-10 bands and singers (see official rules and regulations on Advertising Week's site), and your votes will decide which entrants make it to the finals.
So vote for your favorite act on the official Advertising Week YouTube channel until September 7. The bands with the most votes will live out their rock fantasies at YouTube Battle of the Ad Bands at the Highline Ballroom on September 22 in New York.
Last September, McCann Erickson brought down the house and took home the coveted trophy. Who will emerge as this year's champion? Wunderman with their rendition of AC/DC's "Live Wire"? Lowe NY's version of The Kinks's "You Really Got Me"? It's up to you!
RCKBAND, from Digitas, with their own take on a-ha's "Take on Me"
An independent committee from the Association of Music Producers (AMP) has narrowed the field down to 8-10 bands and singers (see official rules and regulations on Advertising Week's site), and your votes will decide which entrants make it to the finals.
So vote for your favorite act on the official Advertising Week YouTube channel until September 7. The bands with the most votes will live out their rock fantasies at YouTube Battle of the Ad Bands at the Highline Ballroom on September 22 in New York.
Translate documents: sharing across languages and generations
My cousin is in first grade and sometimes she writes short stories for class. I try to share the stories with her grandparents, but because Japanese is their first language and they don't speak English very well, it's been tough. Today we're releasing a feature for Google Docs to make this kind of multi-lingual sharing easier — you can now automatically translate documents into 42 different languages.
So for my cousin's latest story, I helped her type it up in Google Docs and then clicked "Translate document" from the "Tools" menu. In a matter of seconds, Google Docs has translated the whole story into Japanese using Google Translate's technology.
You can replace the original document with the translation or make a new translated version. I like keeping an English version for friends here and creating a separate Japanese version for her grandparents. All the formatting and layout is preserved no matter what language it's in — translations aren't perfect, but we are continuously working on improving translation quality over time. We hope this new feature helps you more easily share information without worrying about language barriers.
So for my cousin's latest story, I helped her type it up in Google Docs and then clicked "Translate document" from the "Tools" menu. In a matter of seconds, Google Docs has translated the whole story into Japanese using Google Translate's technology.
You can replace the original document with the translation or make a new translated version. I like keeping an English version for friends here and creating a separate Japanese version for her grandparents. All the formatting and layout is preserved no matter what language it's in — translations aren't perfect, but we are continuously working on improving translation quality over time. We hope this new feature helps you more easily share information without worrying about language barriers.
A Name Change
Many changes come with getting married. A new house, a new lifestyle, new kitchen appliances and future family additions. But first things first, the biggest change is a new last name. When it comes to changing your name, a woman can decide to take it or leave it. We're asking you newlyweds to please change responsibly!
Some women become attached to their maiden name but still want the same last name as their husband. A quick fix: hyphenating that baby and putting all the names together. What women don't consider is the possible torture of writing out all of those characters on every important document that exists. We're talking checks, doctor visits, insurance forms...the list could go on forever. Just think, you could be writing this out every day:
Some women become attached to their maiden name but still want the same last name as their husband. A quick fix: hyphenating that baby and putting all the names together. What women don't consider is the possible torture of writing out all of those characters on every important document that exists. We're talking checks, doctor visits, insurance forms...the list could go on forever. Just think, you could be writing this out every day:
or this one...
So brides, think carefully about your future name. You don't want people stumbling over your name and not remembering it after an introduction. If you want to keep your last name, make it your middle name!
What did you decide to do with your last name change?
Five years of introducing students to open source
We've just concluded our fifth Google Summer of Code, our flagship global program to introduce college and university students to open source development. Once again, the results this year have been impressive. Nearly 2,000 mentors from 64 countries participated in the program. They worked to bring 1,000 students from 69 countries into the communities of 150 free and open source projects. We're particularly excited this year to have introduced several students to open source development that has a direct impact on social causes, from microfinance software to global educational initiatives to making government data more transparent and accessible. Three months and hundreds of thousands of lines of code later, 85 percent of our student participants have successfully completed their projects. We'll be publishing more extensive program statistics and wrap up reports in the coming weeks on the Google Open Source Blog, so stay tuned there for more news about Google Summer of Code.We'd like to congratulate all of our student participants for their hard work and tremendous achievements this summer. We're excited to hear that many of our students have planned out the next few months of their coding work with their chosen open source project. Finally, our sincerest thanks to all of our mentors for volunteering their time and expertise to help these students more actively engage with open source development.
More books in more places: public domain EPUB downloads on Google Books
Try doing a search for [Hamlet] on Google Books. The first few results you'll get are "Full View" books — which means you can read the full text. And, because the book is in the public domain, you can also download a copy of Hamlet in PDF form.
Starting today, you'll be able to download these and over one million public domain books from Google Books in an additional format. We're excited to now offer downloads in EPUB format, a free and open industry standard for electronic books. It's supported by a wide variety of applications, so once you download a book, you'll be able to read it on any device or through any reading application that supports the format. That means that people will be able to access public domain works that we've digitized from libraries around the world in more ways, including some that haven't even been built or imagined yet.
We founded Google Books on the premise that anyone, anywhere, anytime should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture. We began digitizing these books because we thought it was important for people to be able to find and read them, and we want them to be able to do so anywhere — not just when they happen to be at a computer. This feature takes us one step closer towards realizing that goal by helping support open standards that enable people to access these books in more places, on more devices and through more applications.
To find out more, check out our post on the Google Books blog.
Starting today, you'll be able to download these and over one million public domain books from Google Books in an additional format. We're excited to now offer downloads in EPUB format, a free and open industry standard for electronic books. It's supported by a wide variety of applications, so once you download a book, you'll be able to read it on any device or through any reading application that supports the format. That means that people will be able to access public domain works that we've digitized from libraries around the world in more ways, including some that haven't even been built or imagined yet.
We founded Google Books on the premise that anyone, anywhere, anytime should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture. We began digitizing these books because we thought it was important for people to be able to find and read them, and we want them to be able to do so anywhere — not just when they happen to be at a computer. This feature takes us one step closer towards realizing that goal by helping support open standards that enable people to access these books in more places, on more devices and through more applications.
To find out more, check out our post on the Google Books blog.
Go fish with "Cast a Wide Net" webinar recording
Last month, we hosted a webinar highlighting new strategies to help you get the most from Google Content Network. I am pleased to share that a recording of this session is now available for on-demand viewing.
The webinar provides insight into contextual targeting and reviews strategies and tools to help clients expand their reach while keeping their ROI constant. In addition, it walks you step-by-step through how to "cast a wide net" to enhance existing Content Network campaigns and streamline new campaign creation.
Interested in more webinars and on-demand trainings like this? Check out upcoming sessions on the National Agency Training site.
The webinar provides insight into contextual targeting and reviews strategies and tools to help clients expand their reach while keeping their ROI constant. In addition, it walks you step-by-step through how to "cast a wide net" to enhance existing Content Network campaigns and streamline new campaign creation.
Interested in more webinars and on-demand trainings like this? Check out upcoming sessions on the National Agency Training site.
Plum, Charcoal and Slate
Our latest inspiration board was done by Erinn in our office. She was inspired by the color plum and the richness it brings to a wedding. Mixed with the dark charcoal and lighter slate gray, the board becomes very vintage, romantic, and elegant in it's details. Take a look for yourself... 
What do you think?
Deepika Padukone New Photoshoot For BSNL
Actress Deepika Padukone has been appointed by Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) as its new brand ambassador. She replaces Preity Zinta, who was until now endorsing the.......
8 Images
Transparent Phone
its transparent housing varies depending on the weather! Thus, in the sunny days, the screen will be completely transparent.......
6 Images
Finding great stuff to read with Google Reader
I only followed a handful of blogs when I first started using Google Reader, but was always on the lookout for more great stuff to read. Over time, I discovered that my friends followed lots of interesting sites, and my reading list grew from 4 to 34 sites and blogs as I incorporated their recommendations.
Since then, Reader has launched several sharing features that make it easier to find and subscribe to feeds that your friends like, and we thought that recommendations could make finding good stuff to read even easier. This time, instead of asking our friends, we approached leaders across a variety of fields and asked them what they read online. We received lots of great responses, which we've collected into our second edition of Power Readers. In this edition, we've expanded from Power Readers in Politics to include journalists, techies, fashion critics, foodies and more. We hope this will be a good place to find great things to read, whether you already have an extensive reading list or are totally new to Google Reader.
Plus, now we can answer some questions that have interested us for years: Where does Arianna Huffington go to get different perspectives on the news? When Paul Krugman surfs the web, what are his favorite economics sites? What blogs do tech, foodie and fashion bloggers read? Visit www.google.com/powerreaders to explore and subscribe to any of their reading lists, or to any individual items that they recommend.
A big thanks to all of the contributors who shared their reading lists with us.
Since then, Reader has launched several sharing features that make it easier to find and subscribe to feeds that your friends like, and we thought that recommendations could make finding good stuff to read even easier. This time, instead of asking our friends, we approached leaders across a variety of fields and asked them what they read online. We received lots of great responses, which we've collected into our second edition of Power Readers. In this edition, we've expanded from Power Readers in Politics to include journalists, techies, fashion critics, foodies and more. We hope this will be a good place to find great things to read, whether you already have an extensive reading list or are totally new to Google Reader.
Plus, now we can answer some questions that have interested us for years: Where does Arianna Huffington go to get different perspectives on the news? When Paul Krugman surfs the web, what are his favorite economics sites? What blogs do tech, foodie and fashion bloggers read? Visit www.google.com/powerreaders to explore and subscribe to any of their reading lists, or to any individual items that they recommend.
A big thanks to all of the contributors who shared their reading lists with us.
Quality Score resource: Search ads quality guide
It's that time of the year again, when kids dust off their textbooks and head back to the classroom. In the spirit of learning, we wanted to help you make the grade on Quality Score knowledge with the Search Ads Quality Getting Started Guide. The guide covers a range of topics relating to Quality Score, including how it affects your rank, how it affects your cost-per-click, and how to improve it. You'll even hear from our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, on how the ad auction works.
Use it to learn, refresh, or review the foundations of Quality Score. You may even want to share it with clients to help them understand how their ads are shown on Google.com.
Use it to learn, refresh, or review the foundations of Quality Score. You may even want to share it with clients to help them understand how their ads are shown on Google.com.
In the future, everyone will monetize their 15 minutes
(Cross-posted from the YouTube Biz Blog)
We first launched the YouTube Partnership Program (YPP) to help some of our more popular users make money from their videos on YouTube. While we've focused on accepting prolific users who regularly produce videos that reach a wide audience — like Fred and ValsArtDiary — we've occasionally extended the program to include some of the site's more unforgettable videos, such as the Battle of Kruger, David after dentist and Otters holding hands. These individual video partnerships recognize the role popular "one-off" videos play on YouTube, and have helped many people earn thousands of dollars a month as their videos went viral and endured over time.
We decided it was time to spread the wealth. Today we're excited to announce that we're extending the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos on our site. Now, when you upload a video to YouTube that accumulates lots of views, we may invite you to monetize that video and start earning revenue from it. To determine whether a particular video is eligible for monetization, we look at factors like the number of views, the video's virality and compliance with the YouTube Terms of Service. If your video is eligible for monetization, you will receive an email and see an "Enable Revenue Sharing" message next to your video on the watch page, as well as in other places in your account:
Once you've chosen to enable revenue sharing, YouTube will sell advertising against your video and pay you a revenue share into your Google AdSense account each month. (If you don't have an AdSense account, you'll have the opportunity to create one.) Individual video partnerships will not be eligible for many of the benefits of user partnerships, like enhanced channel features or the ability to monetize other videos in your account, so we encourage you to apply to be a member of the YPP. We'll consider your individual video partnerships when reviewing your YPP application. For now individual video partnerships are available only in the United States, but we hope to roll these out internationally soon.
It's taken us some time to build out the YouTube Partnership Program, our content management tools and other infrastructure to handle expanding the YPP to so many individual users and videos. Now that we're ready to share these opportunities with a wider audience, we're excited to see how individual video partnerships will help even more people make money from their success on YouTube.
We first launched the YouTube Partnership Program (YPP) to help some of our more popular users make money from their videos on YouTube. While we've focused on accepting prolific users who regularly produce videos that reach a wide audience — like Fred and ValsArtDiary — we've occasionally extended the program to include some of the site's more unforgettable videos, such as the Battle of Kruger, David after dentist and Otters holding hands. These individual video partnerships recognize the role popular "one-off" videos play on YouTube, and have helped many people earn thousands of dollars a month as their videos went viral and endured over time.
We decided it was time to spread the wealth. Today we're excited to announce that we're extending the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos on our site. Now, when you upload a video to YouTube that accumulates lots of views, we may invite you to monetize that video and start earning revenue from it. To determine whether a particular video is eligible for monetization, we look at factors like the number of views, the video's virality and compliance with the YouTube Terms of Service. If your video is eligible for monetization, you will receive an email and see an "Enable Revenue Sharing" message next to your video on the watch page, as well as in other places in your account:
Once you've chosen to enable revenue sharing, YouTube will sell advertising against your video and pay you a revenue share into your Google AdSense account each month. (If you don't have an AdSense account, you'll have the opportunity to create one.) Individual video partnerships will not be eligible for many of the benefits of user partnerships, like enhanced channel features or the ability to monetize other videos in your account, so we encourage you to apply to be a member of the YPP. We'll consider your individual video partnerships when reviewing your YPP application. For now individual video partnerships are available only in the United States, but we hope to roll these out internationally soon.
It's taken us some time to build out the YouTube Partnership Program, our content management tools and other infrastructure to handle expanding the YPP to so many individual users and videos. Now that we're ready to share these opportunities with a wider audience, we're excited to see how individual video partnerships will help even more people make money from their success on YouTube.
The bright side of sitting in traffic: Crowdsourcing road congestion data
This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. - Ed.
What if you could do a little something to improve the world during your daily drive to work? Here are a few ideas: tell everybody in the city when you're stuck in slow-moving traffic; warn the drivers on the freeway behind you that they should consider an alternate route; tell the people still at home that they should spend another ten minutes reading the morning news before they leave for work; tell your city government that they might want to change the timing of that traffic light at the highway on-ramp. Of course, you can't just get on the phone and call everybody, and your one traffic report from your one spot on the road might not help much anyway. But if everybody on the road, all at once, could tell the world how fast their car is moving, and we could make it easy for anybody to check that information on their computer or cell phone, well — then we'd be getting somewhere.
If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that's exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.
This week we're expanding our traffic layer to cover all U.S. highways and arterials when data is available. We're able to do this thanks in no small part to the data contributed by our users. This is exactly the kind of technology that we love at Google because it's so easy for a single person to help out, but can be incredibly powerful when a lot of people use it together. Imagine if you knew the exact traffic speed on every road in the city — every intersection, backstreet and freeway on-ramp — and how that would affect the way you drive, help the environment and impact the way our government makes road planning decisions. This idea, which we geeks call "crowdsourcing," isn't new. Ever since GPS location started coming to mainstream devices, people have been thinking of ways to use it to figure out how fast the traffic is moving. But for us to really make it work, we had to solve problems of scale (because you can't get useful traffic results until you have a LOT of devices reporting their speeds) and privacy (because we don't want anybody to be able to analyze Google's traffic data to see the movement of a particular phone, even when that phone is completely anonymous).
We achieve scale by making Google Maps for mobile easy to install and use, and by making it easy for people to provide information about their own vehicle speed. There's no extra device to plug into your car and no extra software to buy. Google Maps is free and works with most cell phones, and the number of cell phones with GPS is rising every day. Some phones, such as the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the Palm Pre, come with Google Maps and traffic crowdsourcing pre-installed (the iPhone Maps application, however, does not support traffic crowdsourcing). Google is fortunate to have a lot of people using our products, and that scale helps make our products better.
We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start. We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when you have chosen to enable location services on your phone. We use our scale to provide further privacy protection: When a lot of people are reporting data from the same area, we combine their data together to make it hard to tell one phone from another. Even though the vehicle carrying a phone is anonymous, we don't want anybody to be able to find out where that anonymous vehicle came from or where it went — so we find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it. We take the privacy concerns related to user location data seriously, and have worked hard to protect the privacy of users who share this data — but we still understand that not everybody will want to participate. If you'd like to stop your phone from sending anonymous location data back to Google, you can find opt-out instructions here.
We've already been able to provide useful traffic information with the help of our existing mobile users, but we hope that is just the start. As GPS-enabled phones and data plans get less expensive, more people will be able to participate. Crowdsourcing traffic gives us a way to harness bits of location data from our users and give it back to them in a form they can use to make impactful decisions that affect their free time, their pocketbooks and the environment. The more people use it, the better it will get. So next time you're sitting in morning traffic, turn on Google Maps for mobile and let someone else know they can hit the snooze button one more time. Tomorrow morning, they might do the same for you.
What if you could do a little something to improve the world during your daily drive to work? Here are a few ideas: tell everybody in the city when you're stuck in slow-moving traffic; warn the drivers on the freeway behind you that they should consider an alternate route; tell the people still at home that they should spend another ten minutes reading the morning news before they leave for work; tell your city government that they might want to change the timing of that traffic light at the highway on-ramp. Of course, you can't just get on the phone and call everybody, and your one traffic report from your one spot on the road might not help much anyway. But if everybody on the road, all at once, could tell the world how fast their car is moving, and we could make it easy for anybody to check that information on their computer or cell phone, well — then we'd be getting somewhere.
If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that's exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.
This week we're expanding our traffic layer to cover all U.S. highways and arterials when data is available. We're able to do this thanks in no small part to the data contributed by our users. This is exactly the kind of technology that we love at Google because it's so easy for a single person to help out, but can be incredibly powerful when a lot of people use it together. Imagine if you knew the exact traffic speed on every road in the city — every intersection, backstreet and freeway on-ramp — and how that would affect the way you drive, help the environment and impact the way our government makes road planning decisions. This idea, which we geeks call "crowdsourcing," isn't new. Ever since GPS location started coming to mainstream devices, people have been thinking of ways to use it to figure out how fast the traffic is moving. But for us to really make it work, we had to solve problems of scale (because you can't get useful traffic results until you have a LOT of devices reporting their speeds) and privacy (because we don't want anybody to be able to analyze Google's traffic data to see the movement of a particular phone, even when that phone is completely anonymous).
We achieve scale by making Google Maps for mobile easy to install and use, and by making it easy for people to provide information about their own vehicle speed. There's no extra device to plug into your car and no extra software to buy. Google Maps is free and works with most cell phones, and the number of cell phones with GPS is rising every day. Some phones, such as the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the Palm Pre, come with Google Maps and traffic crowdsourcing pre-installed (the iPhone Maps application, however, does not support traffic crowdsourcing). Google is fortunate to have a lot of people using our products, and that scale helps make our products better.
We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start. We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when you have chosen to enable location services on your phone. We use our scale to provide further privacy protection: When a lot of people are reporting data from the same area, we combine their data together to make it hard to tell one phone from another. Even though the vehicle carrying a phone is anonymous, we don't want anybody to be able to find out where that anonymous vehicle came from or where it went — so we find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it. We take the privacy concerns related to user location data seriously, and have worked hard to protect the privacy of users who share this data — but we still understand that not everybody will want to participate. If you'd like to stop your phone from sending anonymous location data back to Google, you can find opt-out instructions here.
We've already been able to provide useful traffic information with the help of our existing mobile users, but we hope that is just the start. As GPS-enabled phones and data plans get less expensive, more people will be able to participate. Crowdsourcing traffic gives us a way to harness bits of location data from our users and give it back to them in a form they can use to make impactful decisions that affect their free time, their pocketbooks and the environment. The more people use it, the better it will get. So next time you're sitting in morning traffic, turn on Google Maps for mobile and let someone else know they can hit the snooze button one more time. Tomorrow morning, they might do the same for you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
